WHEN RAT HAD BANGED THE GATE SHUT BEHIND US, I was able to confirm that it was not early morning, as I’d believed for an instant, but evening. That was a shame: going out early in the morning to scour the streets of Educación in the company of the legendary Rat would have heightened the drama when I told my story to Guillermo and everyone else in the class.
At that hour, the street was completely deserted. But then my street was always deserted, at any hour. Groups of children playing soccer in the middle of the cul-de-sac, the goalposts marked by bundles of backpacks and sweatshirts, was a rare sight. But there were no children, backpacks, or sweatshirts there now, the street was empty, or almost empty: in the distance, at the junction with the main avenue, I could just make out the figure of the man from the fruit store closing the metal grille of his premises.
This may sound like exaggeration, but the truth is that, at the age of ten, I was deeply concerned about the subject of consciousness. That’s to say, I frequently had that sense of disquiet and estrangement that is the basis of philosophy—but also of all angst—and that causes us to question why we’re thinking what we’re thinking, why we’re alive, why being rather than nothingness, and so on. According to my childish theology, which I’ve already outlined above, any god directly involved in my upbringing was or should be in charge of all that stuff. But he was sometimes absent or at others seemed slightly less plausible than usual, and then a sense of absurdity, gratuitousness, and imminent disaster closed in on me. True, I didn’t then have the words to express all this. I was simply moving through the world with a confidence that would suddenly evaporate, making me feel vulnerable, small, at the mercy of any peril.
That evening, walking beside Rat through the neighborhood streets, I suffered one of those episodes of metaphysical angst: an unfolding of my being (reverse origami) and a profound sense of helplessness. There was no raison d’être underlying anything. However many letters I stole, I’d never know the real reason for Teresa’s departure. However many Zero Luminosity Capsules I constructed, and however many hours I spent inside them, I’d never succeed in disappearing completely or making myself invisible to the agents of evil. And however many leaves and sheets of paper I folded down the middle, origami wasn’t going to give meaning to anything at all, because symmetry wasn’t a material state but an invention of the mind; half a sheet of paper was always imperfect and, therefore, the cranes, frogs, pagodas, and kimonos made of folded paper had a lie at their very cores, as do, of course, flesh-and-blood humans: we, too, are formed from a fundamental lie, or at least a fiction (a redemptive lie). If the fold that is the basis of origami rests on a false premise, the same can be said of the innermost fold of our personalities, the fold no one can ever access, the fold of our selves—the dolorous reverse side we hide, conceal like a secret letter in the night table of life; that fold, I’d tell myself, is also an optical illusion, and in fact our only essence is our fears, our only identity our frustrations, our only meaning our cry in the deep shadows of time.
Naturally, I didn’t think all that at the age of ten, I’m projecting these reflections onto the inexpressible concern I experienced then as a sort of bubble stuck at some indefinite point within my sickly rib cage.
It isn’t always easy for me to make that distinction, to know for sure if my memories are simply a projection of what—lying here on the left side of a double bed, surrounded by packets of pills and notebooks full of crossings-out—I think now, twenty-three years later. Memories are fabrications that bear little relationship to their supposed origins, and each and every time we recall something, that memory becomes more autonomous, more detached from the past, as if the cord holding it to life itself is fraying until one day, it snaps and the memory bolts, runs free through the fallow field of the spirit, like a liberated goat taking to the hills.
Rat took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his denim jacket and offered me one. To be polite, I took it. He then moved the flickering flame of his lighter close to my face, and I took a deep suck. I coughed, the flame went out, and at the exact instant when it disappeared, it occurred to me that Teresa might be dead. It was a fleeting thought, one I hadn’t had since the time my mother fainted on the edge of the market, by the stand selling piñatas and themed costumes. And although that idea darkened my mood like a cloud suddenly casting a shadow over everything, I didn’t share my thoughts.
Rat lit his own cigarette and took a long drag, expelling the smoke simultaneously through his nostrils and mouth, while I made careful note of the process, eager to learn how to smoke like my improbable hero.
The streets of Educación were, and still are, identical: cul-de-sacs branching out from a secondary avenue that leads to a wider one. There was the Rec, with its rusty goal and, in another small park behind an elementary school, a couple of slides—also rusty.
Originally constructed to house workers affiliated with the union of state-owned oil company employees, the neighborhood later became the territory of the teaching equivalent, which immediately wanted to put its own stamp on it: the streets are all indicated by letters and the avenues by numbers. Some of the main avenues bear the names of union bosses, as if the alphabet included their heroic deeds.
In Educación, it was always necessary to refer to the block you were talking about, because two streets might have the same name. The blocks, for their part, were shown in Roman numerals. By the age of six, I’d memorized my address (No. 23, Calle H, Block III, off Avenida 2) at the insistence of Teresa, who invented a jingle to make it easier to remember and repeat that uninspiring alphanumerical sequence. My friend Guillermo was very surprised that places in my neighborhood sounded like moves in a game of Battleship, where you sink enemy ships by giving their location using the Cartesian coordinate system. He used to say that it was like I’d learned the coordinates of my house instead of my address. I hadn’t the faintest idea what coordinates were but, too ashamed to ask, would just give a forced laugh.
The cigarette that Rat offered me and the episode of metaphysical angst joined forces to leave me suddenly dizzy; I experienced a sort of feverishness, with a simultaneous sense of clarity that perhaps derived from nausea. I thought I was going to throw up, but luckily nothing emerged from my mouth. Rat glanced in my direction and laughed quietly. He gave me a friendly punch on the back, which didn’t hurt and made me feel grown up, his equal. Could it be that Rat was now my friend? Then he plucked the cigarette from my mouth and took a drag on it while still smoking his own. The two cigarettes hung from his lower lip as if by magic, kept there by some unknowable force. He took them from his mouth with his right hand and exhaled the smoke, a lot of smoke, through his nostrils and mouth, just as he’d done before. I watched him in stupefaction, unable to understand why anyone would want to smoke two cigarettes at the same time. As if reading my mind, he murmured, “Waste not, want not. You wouldn’t have been able to manage the whole thing.” I was annoyed by that insinuation, but had to accept—and concede through my silence—that he was right.
We walked along Avenida 3, passing the arcade and Los Orgullosos, inside which rotated the reddish meat of the tacos al pastor. The smell of scorched meat mingled with the less pleasant odor rising from the sewage system. I didn’t ask Rat where we were going because just following him was exciting, and, in any case, the whole scene had a dream-like quality that held me in suspense, as if I were expecting to wake at any moment.
We reached Canal de Miramontes, which for me was the midrib of the cosmos, from which branched out the other half of the planet: the part that wasn’t Colonia Educación, and within the confines of which my imagination grouped such diverse places as Taxqueña, Cuernavaca, Chiapas, and the United States. All those unfathomable destinations had to be a thousand or ten thousand times the size of Educación, according to my hasty calculations. That’s to say, a space so large you could be lost in it forever: an inferno deeper than the sack into which the Bogeyman dropped stolen children.
Rat was chain-smoking as if he found Earth’s atmosphere toxic and only tobacco fumes were keeping him alive. (And the truth is, he wasn’t the only one to find the atmosphere at that time and place highly toxic: with air pollution levels at about 200 on the Metropolitan Index of Air Quality, during the summer of 1994, breathing was an extreme sport.) He smoked every cigarette right down to the end, until the smell of the burning filter reminded him that it was time to light the next. His voice was nasal and, being on the point of breaking, fluctuated between the deep baritone it would become a few months later and the squeakiness of childhood. Maybe that’s why he rarely said much. He glanced at me suspiciously, as if he had something important to say but was thinking the better of it even before opening his mouth. When we got to the corner of Taxqueña and Miramontes, Rat seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second. He threw down his cigarette, this time only half-smoked, turned to face me, and, putting his hands on my shoulders as if to prevent me from being distracted by the chaos of vehicles and ambulant street sellers, asked: “Do you know where the fuck your mom is, child?”
I was finally able to show Rat that I wasn’t a child, that I knew what was going on, knew even more than Mariana. “Yes,” I said, sure of myself for the first time that night. “She’s in Chiapas. She’s gone camping.”
Rat’s face was transformed. He clearly hadn’t expected that reply. Just as his voice sometimes betrayed his former age, his astonished expression brought back the face he must have had years before—before the beer, cigarettes, and temporary tattoos. He attempted to recompose his degenerate-maudit teenage features and scrutinized me as if trying to work out whether I was conscious of the implications of my reply.
“I want something to eat,” I said in an attempt to change the subject, but also because the pangs of hunger had suddenly returned. “I fell asleep in the capsule and haven’t had anything all day.” The peseros and trolleybuses were forming a solid wall along Avenida Taxqueña. Rat went to a street cart, leaving me a few steps behind, and bought a can of Coca-Cola and some Japanese cracker nuts. The woman pushing the cart had no change for the two-hundred new-peso bill that Rat proffered her, and he had to rummage in his pockets for coins. He handed me the plastic bag containing the booty: “Here you go, crackbrain.”
I was beginning to weary of his offhand manner, but the adventure of going beyond the bounds of my neighborhood in the company of someone more popular than any of my friends made me swallow my pride: there was something bigger at stake.
Rat beckoned me to follow him and hurled himself between the trolleybuses and peseros without waiting for the traffic signals to change. I thought we were going to die, but followed him anyway, because the idea of being left alone on Avenida Taxqueña was even more frightening. We crossed the street to the sound of polyphonic horns, dodging weary pedestrians laden with packages and suitcases, and arrived on the outskirts of the Terminal Central de Autobuses del Sur. In front of it, the Taxqueña market engulfed the pesero stop and the entrance to the metro, stretching out like an ocean of junk.
A woman passed near me carrying a live, flapping hen by its bound feet. For a moment I watched two children in rags playing a game that involved throwing stones at a bottle.
Just before we reached the terminal, Rat once again seemed to hesitate momentarily. “I’ve got a hunch Mariana might be here, inside. She knows where your old lady is too.” He stressed the last sentence, as if demonstrating that he’d been aware of just what was going on before I told him.
Something didn’t quite add up: if my sister was looking for me, why would she go to the bus terminal? I’d never expressed any interest in traveling anywhere by bus. I sometimes used to talk about flying in a jet plane, or even sailing on a ship, which to me seemed exciting and strange, but buses were, in my opinion, ordinary and unattractive. Teresa, Mariana, and I had once gone to Tepoztlán on a bus that had departed from that very terminal, and the stink of vomit seeping from the restroom had made me feel sick ten minutes into the journey. If Mariana knew anything at all, she’d be looking for me at the Rec, or on the slides, or any other place in Educación, but not in the bus terminal by the Taxqueña metro station.
Rat worked out that something was bothering me. I suppose it was obvious (when I’m worried I frown deeply, even nowadays). He spoke quickly, nervously; for the first time I understood that he didn’t know exactly what we were doing either: “Look, crackbrain, Mariana was a bit canned. Don’t tell anyone. We’d been drinking in her room. When we couldn’t find you anywhere in the house, she started crying, thought something had happened to you. Then she began babbling on about your old lady, said she was in Chiapas and something about going to look for her. I wasn’t really listening. I thought she was afraid of getting a bawling out. She told me to stay and wait for you and ran out of the house. But she’s been gone for around two hours now.” Rat paused, allowing me to take all that in before continuing, “Do you understand that there’s a war in Chiapas? Tanks and soldiers. We have to find Mariana.”
It wasn’t easy to digest all that information. That Teresa, a woman with a monotone voice and firm convictions, should have gone to Chiapas was one thing, but that my drunken sister should decide to follow her was much more serious.
Of course, I already knew that there was a war in Chiapas, I’d seen it on TV. For months it had been the only thing anyone anywhere talked about. At school, we’d been assembled in the auditorium, and it was explained that nothing was going to happen in the capital, but Guillermo’s elder brother had told him that the Zapatistas were going to kill the president and take away rich people’s houses. Even though Guillermo’s brother wasn’t generally a reliable source of information, my friend and I had gotten steamed up by just the idea of all that. Teresa was constantly muttering insults about the president (“that bald murderer,” she used to call him), and at the beginning of the year the promise of his overthrow had excited me for a few weeks. Then, in March, someone had shot Colosio, the PRI presidential candidate—in Teresa’s view, he was just as bad as “that bald murderer.” The shooting had taken place in Tijuana, which, as we were told in geography class—geography wasn’t my strongest subject—was more or less on the other side of the country. That was when the war and generalized fraying of nerves took up permanent residence in the house in Educación. The arguments between Teresa and my father about the situation in Chiapas and the forthcoming elections grew in intensity and volume. Only the soccer World Cup had managed to calm things for thirty days, distracting my father from current affairs.
The clamor of war and politics was amplified at school. During recess, the children in sixth grade sometimes made a game of frightening us, saying that they had seen Zapatistas or—even worse—soldiers behind the co-op, in the vacant lot that the principal had promised to transform into a small soccer field at some point in the future.
One day, a boy in my class turned up wearing a red balaclava with a pompom on top, and fights were organized between the two most aggressive pupils, one representing the insurgents in balaclavas and the other the forces of law and order—who were booed by the naturally rebellious children, the ones who were always talking in class. Later that afternoon, when I told Teresa about those small-scale reproductions of the political tension in the country, she attempted to explain something about the indigenous peoples. Before she could finish, my father interrupted to drag me off to watch a soccer game in which the Mexican team was playing. On another occasion, he commented over breakfast that Chiapas was a beehive. I didn’t understand the metaphor then, but the idea of a gigantic beehive containing whole cities and enormous bees gave me a nightmare.
All those scenes (the scraps at school, the noisy domestic arguments, the red balaclava with a pompom, the mutant bees) came back to flood my mind when I heard Rat mention the war, the tanks, the possibility that Mariana had followed in Teresa’s footsteps and run away to Chiapas.
I felt betrayed. It hurt me that, knowing where Teresa was, my sister hadn’t sat down and talked to me, explained what was going on in our family. In fact, she’d left me to investigate on my own, to steal letters and spend whole days inside a dark closet when we could have been coming up with a plan—a sibling plan to get our mother back—or running away together. It felt unfair that Mariana had gone, leaving me alone with my father, abandoning me to a life of boredom while she was having an adventure.
Now Rat was trying to drag me into the bus terminal, or the war, to save my sister and maybe even my mother. It wasn’t particularly clear why he needed me as his shield carrier, but at that moment I had no intention of asking questions. It was that, or go back home to watch reruns of the soccer World Cup with my father, eat Hawaiian pizza, and make non-figurative origami figures until the end of the summer vacation.
Although I was eager to start, I was also sorry not to have come better prepared. If I’d known that we were setting out on an expedition of that caliber, I’d have brought my jacket with secret pockets, and my Choose Your Own Adventure book to act as a sort of guide. But I understood that at certain critical moments life offers the opportunity to really choose our own adventures and decided that following Rat to war would make me the envy of every boy in my class; if, that is, I managed to stay alive until the new school year.
By the time Rat and I had passed through the doors of the Autobuses del Sur terminal, the only outcome to that adventure my imagination was capable of coming up with was personal triumph. I heard a bubblegum-scented Citlali laughing and saw Ximena doling out over-the-top gestures of affection while I told them how I’d found their best friend, my sister, who by then was allowing me to choose whatever pizza I wanted, and was asking—as if she really cared—how the Zero Luminosity Capsule worked. I saw my grateful father comparing me to Bebeto or Romário. I saw, more clearly than anything else, Teresa smoking in silence by the door, secretly proud of her son.